MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
Over 100 so far today, middle management scum so cop it from all directions. Seems to be ever increasing and as we've been told no laptops and phones in the never ending succession of meetings how are you ever supposed to be productive if all you're doing is talking about shit and playing email ping pong! Tell me I'm not alone because it's doing my bloody head in!
To think I trained as an electrician to actually work with my hands and make stuff work....
I used to be tech support.(not in it)
Would get about 20-30 a day from operations.
I moved into operations when the tech support department got closed.
I have no one to email. - but on the plus side I only get about 5 client related emails a day.
It seemed that all of our regions just forwarded any questions they got from client to me at tech support.
Back to wiring then. 20/week if I'm lucky
about 10-20, mostly as I must just be too expensive for people and I can speak to most of my colleagues face to face
When I was a Site Agent on construction sites I would get 200 plus a day some days, coming in early (6am where contracted work was 8am start) to try and go through them
Nowadays, I get one a day telling me how many guests I have on the next day's tour (bike guide doing wine tastings in the Wachau, Austria).
Over 100 a day but only about 25-40 of those are meaningful. I get copied into a lot of crap.
I get copied into a lot of crap.
to be honest, so did I. I still had to read them though.
So many that I am forever having to clear our my 500MB inbox just to be able to send any replies.
I have well and truly lost the battle. Never counted the amount I get a day but I was off work ill for 3 days 2 months ago and since then have had 700 unread emails in my account I've never gone back and read. This academic year my inbox has gone up by 24,000 and I have deleted 42,000. Only about a third of my working life is desk bound. Completely defeated - as an institution we have lost the plot.
Completely defeated – as an institution we have lost the plot.
Institutionally something like slack is a winner here.
Anything that is not to 1 or 2 people goes through that, all the project/group announcements that everyone shold see go there. Leave email for communicating.
I have 4000 unread at the moment and I deleted 10k a year or so back. Mental. One of the PMs sets Out Of Office saying he's in meetings, emails will be deleted, resend tomorrow if important. Senior management told him today that's not acceptable....
How many do i receive... No idea.
Alot more than actually get to my main inbox.
Rules are the key.
I set up an Outlook rule which moves all Cc email into another folder which if I can be bothered I’ll read once in a while. If it’s not directed to me individually then I assume it’s not too important that I know about it.
I have since set the same rule up on other people’s computers and they think I’m sent from heaven it’s saved them so much time.
I get about 30 a day but I make sure I’ve never got more than 15-20 in my inbox at the end of the day.
4,or 5,is normal. None today:-)
None of them are ever the one I'm waiting for though
‘Only’ 78 today, but the usual summer Iull has started, at peak times it can be 200+.
I don’t mind really, I do 99% of my ‘stuff’ via email and I can touch type. I use outlook to organise myself, I actually find phone calls annoying, it feels like they’re queue jumping ha ha. I sometimes have to email myself or I’ll forget we spoke.
Its also invaluable when disagreements raise their head, what was said, when, by whom etc.
Its another skill though, it helps if you’ve got a decent email system - Outlook ‘16 with 365 removes a lot of the arseache - get a dozen pointless auto generated emails a day? Stick ‘em in clutter, same goes for the massive group point-scoring emails, I’m stuck in a 2 year old massive group mail with some Texan IT bods, totally ignored this end.
About half of the emails I get make it to my inbox, the rest are there if I need them, but I rarely do. Turn off that read receipt bullshit, keep on top of the spam if you have to.
Completely defeated – as an institution we have lost the plot.
Institutionally something like slack is a winner here.
slack is decent, whatsapp for business really.
I have a zero inbox policy.
Rules that file fluff away for future reference, a daily morning purge of stuff the rules don't cover so at most I might have ten or so emails in my inbox that actually need attention.
I'm always supprised how little active management of email people use, even for people that receive huge amounts.
aye, if you are getting stuff you can ignore, stick a rule on it and forget about it.
60-70 emails and the other day I worked out I received or made a call on average every 8 minutes through a 9hr40m shift. Not surprisingly I get frustrated when being told that I have not done enough forecasting or missed picking up one of the many mistakes that cause delays in my organisation.
[i]I have a zero inbox policy.[/i]
Not pointing the finger at matty, but generally I find those who go home with an empty inbox each day are those that stick their head under the pillow and occasionally get caught out when an old email chain is recirculated, showing that said person had left an important issue unresolved as they wanted to clear their inbox, subsequently causing a substantial delay to one of our customers! I rarely drop below 20 emails as I will not delete the last email of a particular chain until I know I have resolved the problem.
Rules erm.. rule.
All the cc’d stuff or from “certain” people get dumped into respective folders with deletion time stamps on them. Likewise those “I’m on holiday...blah blah blah”
Honestly, some of the utter tripe I get involved in asounds me sometimes.
Thankfully, my Director thinks the same and we adopt this policy across the board.
We too have a policy of no laptops in meetings unless presentations are run off them, phones are allowed though otherwise what would I do in boring meetings other than keep an eye on here...
Meaningful mails = 30/40
Crap for ultimate deletion = 20/30
You see it depends. If I ignore an email for a few days then the original sender will have moved on to other tasks. I can then act on the information/request and complete the task at hand/reply with a complete answer/full info. This is generally possible due to the nature of the work
However, the moment I reply to anything there is an exponential increase in the flow of mail. Occasionally it can be a non-stop flow into the night.
Between none and maybe 10 subjects / day. With replies / conversations it can be a lot more emails, but probably only a handful of conversations a day. A mix of 50% external (customers) and 50% internal - mainly wanting help/support on the SW tools I write...
100+ a day, of which about 5% are meaningful. Filtering through them is a skill
About 98% less than I did before I got my self removed from the sales@ distribrution list.
It's not the number of emails that are the problem. Most are read in 10 seconds and filed / deleted/ ignored.
It's the requests for information which can seem quite reasonable that could easily result in 2 days of pulling data and manipulation only for the requestor to look at at for 3 seconds and go, 'oh right'.
i used to spend ages stopping my team from sucking up and doing them.
"inbox zero"
I have a onebox policy. I don't file anything. I only delete spam. If it needs a response, it gets a star/flag until I reply, otherwise it just sits there in the great compost heap. I can find emails up to several years back in a few seconds (given half a hint as to contents/sender/subject) and say (with proof) "yeah I answered that one the next day". As I just did recently in fact.
Now computers have infinite memory and immediate search power, there's no point in filing.
Not pointing the finger at matty, but generally I find those who go home with an empty inbox each day are those that stick their head under the pillow and occasionally get caught out when an old email chain is recirculated
It's not a literal zero policy, it's a frequent cleaning of kipple, rules for automated server status alerts that contain the word "ok" for example, I never need to see, so they go straight to an alerts folder which I delete every few months
Stuff that I don't need to act on, but is reIevent to me I manually move to a sub folder for future reference.
Anything I do actually need to act on, stays in the inbox until I deal with it, which is far fewer, and then I flag anything that needs to be dealt with in the immediate future so I can prioritise.
Usually about 150 a day. Currently towards the end of a fortnight of annual leave so Sunday will involve a lot of skim and delete.... I have checked off a few important ones while off mind you, though only a handful.
From colleagues, very few. From the various systems like Jira, quite a lot depending on how much is going on. Generally there's so few that they get skim read.
At home I have lots of mailbox rules so things remain fairly tidy.
[i]It’s not a literal zero policy, it’s a frequent cleaning of kipple, rules for automated server status alerts that contain the word “ok” for example, I never need to see, so they go straight to an alerts folder which I delete every few months[/i]
My old boss would go home to an empty inbox each evening, and get really irate if anyone had the cheek to work paid overtime at the weekend and possibly generate a few emails in the course of their work as he'd be 'behind' on Monday morning 😉 (He also hated leaving the office to visit his mobile workers as he hated the fact he might not respond to an important email in a timely manner)
I've got about 31,000 unread ones in my work inbox, so it's largely irrelevant how many more come in 😀
If someone wants me they'll tag me in teams.
None whatsoever. If anyone needs me to do anything they just give me a shout on my radio.